Of company parties

A 15th anniversary of your company is indeed time for celebration, but when the number of guests hovers around a few thousand, you can only imagine the scene at dinner. Having to stand in a line for over 10 minutes just to get to the plate counter is a good time for all sorts of exercises for your brain… cursing, introspection, and any other mind games you can think of. But when that long wait for a plateful results in you reaching the table exactly when the guy in front of you picks up the last remaining plate, it is absolute torture. It makes you realize how royal the Indian pangat system is. Actually, that wait gave me a chance to apply some logic and devise a strategy to launch a planned attack on dinner queues. I am going to try that out at the next buffet I attend.

I am not blaming anybody here for that though…you gotta cut the poor hotel management some slack. It’s not easy catering to so many people at once, and I didn’t help myself by reaching the venue a bit late (particularly after the queues had transformed into a human chain). Harsh deadlines do not permit the luxury of leaving office any earlier in the evening than 8 :30, which also resulted in me missing the good (I hear) performance from Bela Shende. But what is the justification of serving cold rotis and some undoubtedly underfed chicken? And by the time I managed to finish the stuff in my plate, that I had managed to procure from one my breeziest visits to a buffet counter, the queue had now shifted to the ice cream place… damn. A few scoops of vanilla ice cream are no way worth any amount of queuing. Eventually, luckily I found an empty ice cream counter, but even there, all I got was a few thin slithers. That was all the hapless fella could dig out of the stone hard ice cream for me :( Icecream’s supposed to lift up your spirits right?, this just made the evening worse.

This has got to be one of the least enjoyable celebration dinners. Sob.